Resources 🍦 Icons, Tutorials, Rp help

o.2 : psds on a gif

The people who already know this will probably think this is self explanatory from the last chapter but trust me, when I was first trying to figure this out I did NOT get it and the explanations I found were so dang complicated for my small brain, really turned me off to the whole gif idea.  So i'm going to try and explain this in a plain and simple way. Hopefully in a way that as the chapters go on we can just add to what we know from the previous one.

We'll be using the same psd from the last chapter and here's the example gif we'll be editing today.

first thing you want to do is open a timeline window before you open your gif.
Go to the window drop down menu and click timeline. It's right under swatches.
Then open your gif, it'll be all spread out so right now it should look like this.

STEP 2 :  open the psd, (see the previous chapter) and choose whichever way you want to do that. I'm doing the duplicate group way.

Now note, when you add the psd it'll appear after the first layer because that's the one that is automatically visible. You need to drag the psd layer all the way to the end gif layer so it will be on all of them.

We're going to click the lines thing in the circle (leave me alone okay this is how I explain everything) 

The lines thing is going to open another timeline tab where you can play through your gif and see if it looks how you want it to. This isn't mandatory since we don't have any other layers going for us and it's just a gif and a psd. But again it's a force of habit for me to look at it before I export. It'll come in handy when we get onto adding text onto gifs and gifs onto templates but let's not think so far ahead. We're off to export and since it's a gif we're saving it differently from the photo in the last chapter.

That will open this screen

In the upper right hand corner where it says preset make sure you're setting it to gif and the highest dithered. This means you'll have all the ranges of colors in your gif and it won't look real pixelated. Essentially it'll look smoother with a wider color palette at 128 dithered.

Click the save as at the bottom of the window not to be mistaken with the done button because while you might think they're the same they are not. After that all you have to do is name it and click okay, no tinkering with the other tabs. and here's our finished product with a before and after!

UP NEXT ↬ icon basics